Lighting the Match

Holding in contempt that’s boundless
aspirations unfulfilled,
don’t conclude that they were groundless,
and towards them feel ill-willed,
asking cruelly: “How on earth
could anyone have ever thought
such aspirations might give birth
to something viable?” Not taught
the context of these aspirations,
we don’t know if they weren’t as good
as those to which we give ovations
since they succeeded. Failure should
not lead us to conclude what failed
was doomed, or what succeeded
was bound to. When Columbus sailed,
it was India that he needed
to find and to discover. We
should not judge failures of the past
on facts we learn from history.
Doubts on us will one day be cast
as we on others cast today,
based on the failures we are bound
to make, aspiring to what may
be as absurd as those we found
in predecessors. What we choose
to do, rejecting many choices,
will cause a lot of us to lose,
but not until historians’ voices
are heard will we know whether what
we do will have success, although
our end result may not be what in fact not
be what we aimed at while an embryo,
although we may succeed provided
we can conceive ideas that hatch
flame-warmed by matches, lighted
to disappear when burned, a match
like that which Hannah Senesh lit,
both with her verse and with her deeds,
by both making a heroic hit
for the survivors of these seeds.

In “Leap of Faith,” Jewish Review of Books, April 2026, Allan Arkush, reviewing Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe by Matti Friedman, writes:

In the middle of 1944, Slovak rebels staged an uprising against the Fascist puppet government and established a precarious stronghold for anti-Nazi forces. It was too late for this to help Slovakia’s Jews, two-thirds of whom had already been deported to death camps. But it represented a promising opportunity for the Americans, the British, and the Russians, who hoped that the enclave could survive until the advancing Russian army reached it…..

All of the parachutists, including the one destined to become most famous, Hannah Senesh, were similarly “terrified for their families in Europe, tormented by their own relative safety and by their inability to help.” But there was more to it than that, and Hannah was the one who best put her feelings into words. The daughter of an important Hungarian writer, and a budding writer herself, she was a teenage convert to Zionism who escaped from Budapest just before the war, changed her name from Anna to Hannah, and quickly became a kibbutznik. But that didn’t satisfy her for long….

“The Hannah of legend,” Friedman tells us, “is idealistic and prepared for sacrifice,” but far from debunking this legend, he substantiates it. He quotes, for example, her conversation with another parachutist (who survived the war) while preparing in Yugoslavia to cross the border into Hungary:

One night, Joel [Palgi] and Hannah leave the bonfire and walk in the forest. She confesses to inner turmoil. She knows the risk, but she’s going to cross. It’s better to die with a clear conscience than to return without trying, she says, and if she fails, at least the Jews in Nazi hands will hear of her attempt and draw comfort and courage. These may be pronouncements placed in her mouth later on, but to me they sound like Hannah.

If these words sound authentic to Friedman, it’s in large part because they seem to presage the poem Hannah handed to another of the parachutists just before undertaking her doomed mission:

Happy is the match that flared and lit the flames.
Happy is the flame that burned secret in the deepest hearts.
Happy is the heart that knew when in honor to stop.
Happy is the match that flared and lit the flames.

Friedman singles out the act of lighting as the essential feature of the poem: “What separates the Diaspora from the Land of Israel, and Anna from Hannah, is action.” The second verb in the first and the last line, he writes, “lies at the center of the mission. In fact, I believe it’s the key to the mystery that has always hovered around the events—what the mission was and why figures who seemed to achieve so little became legends.”